Children at the Shaban Spahija School in the western Kosovo town of Peja huddle together in the winter months, placing their bags in front of broken windows to block the chill wind.
Petrit Collaku
BIRN
Pristina
A few hundred metres away stands a half-finished building, due to replace the run-down school. Work started in April 2010, but has never been completed.
The local director of education believes cash was diverted away to pay for Kosovo’s biggest ever infrastructure project – 77km of highway built by the US construction giant Bechtel and its Turkish partner Enka.
An economic meltdown was only averted in Kosovo after the government slashed budgets from other ministries in order to meet the highway’s rising cost.
Besim Avdimetaj, Director of Education for the local municipality, known as Pec in Serbian, describes the current conditions as “catastrophic”.
According to the Kosovo government’s published budget, Bechtel-Enka received more from 2011 to 2013 than any of the country’s ministries. And with a 239m euro bill for 2012, the partnership received almost three times the entire budget of the Ministry of Health.
The interior, environment, infrastructure (discounting the highway), agriculture and education ministries saw their budgets cut to raise cash to pay Bechtel-Enka.
Avdimetaj said many schools in Peja remained unfinished because funds were used to finance the highway instead.
The Ministry of Education told him the school will be finished by August. “I will believe it when I see it,” he says.
“I believe that the focus of investing in the highway has had big impact in delays of the construction of schools.”
But the Ministry of Education, which funds the project, rejected Avdimetaj’s claims delays were caused by the highway, arguing instead it had always planned to complete the work in the summer of 2014.
Teachers at the school and Avdimetaj question this version of events, arguing that there had been several earlier promises of completion.
Sixteen-year-old student Qlirim Qeta warns: “We are here to gain knowledge but when the time comes for studies we might end up in hospital because it is very cold in the classroom, or get an infection because of the lack of hygiene.”
Classrooms are heated by wooden stoves, the roof has innumerable leaks, and the windows and doors are smashed.
Opposition politician and economic professor Avdullah Hoti believes the highway was a luxury Kosovo could ill afford.
“In a country with deep poverty, where half of the population lives in extreme poverty, with unemployment up to 45 per cent and youth unemployment at 70 per cent, with pensioners and families on social assistance receiving 60 euro per month, I think the highway has been a luxury that a poor citizen cannot afford,” he says.
“Almost half of the population have no access to drinking water from a safe water supply.”
Bechtel contracted 40 per cent of its work out to local companies and workers but Hoti believes this has not delivered sustainable development.
“No new jobs have been left after the completion of this project. The few workers who have worked in manual labour returned to their homes,” he says
Officials from the Prime Minister’s office and Ministry of Infrastructure in Pristina refused to answer questions about the scheme and its impact on the economy.
This article was produced as part of a programme titled “A Paper Trail to Better Governance”, with funding from the Austrian Development Cooperation (ADC) and implemented by BIRN. The content does not reflect views and opinions of ADC.
